Note: This exposes much…trying to set an example of which you are expected to follow with your own blank verse. Do not chicken out on me.
I have taken risks.
alan
POETRY READING IN KENSINGTON MARKET, MAY 27, 2018
(inspired the worst and best in me…as it wlll do to you I hope…with apologies for my own blank and feeble verse)
ALAN SKEOCH
MAY 27, 2018
“Alan, we have been invited to a poetry reading in Kensington Market on Sunday afternoon”
“Poetry…people reading poetry in Kensington?”
“Yes, we must go.”
“Who invited us?”
“Keith Gebarian…the writer, art critic…and poet.”
“I thought he wrote history and pop fiction.:
‘Also seven books of poetry.”
“What kind? Like Cr. Zeuss?”
“Don’t be silly…he writes hard edged poetry…stuff that makes you think.”
“Is Just Keith speaking at the Kensington affair?”
“No there will be six or seven poets.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Maybe Judy will join us while Eric is convalescing.”
“Good idea.”
“Marjorie this is a big deal. All of Kensington is exploding with people…a happening for sure.”
“Hope the car doesn’t get towed away…”
“I bet there are not many people who have ever gone to a poetry reading.”
“Something new for sure.”
“How much are the books?”
“Any book by any of the poets…$20.”
“Marjorie, I think poetry is a kind of addiction…makes us want to open up…to fess up to thoughts.”
“Getting carried away are you?”
“You bet your life. I can do as I damn well please…reached that age.”
“Holy Smoke…Augusta Avenue must have 3,000 people walking about today”
“Not just poets.”
RASPUTIN DID NOT DIE
Those eyes are a time tunnel
a road to the deep past
when men manipulated
this world in ways mysterious
alan skeoch
May 2018
WHISKEY GLASS
The poet spoke of a whisky wall
obscured by misty burnished fluid
And there it was before me
like Medusa
and a score of others
who attempt to tempt.
alan skeoch
May 27, 2018
MY MOM IS OVER THERE
That’s my mom
She brought us here
to share the sunshine
with others
and laugh and dance
and talk triumphantly
of good times to come
alan skeoch
May 2018
PARKING
“Hello, dear,
“I think it’s safe to park here?”
“Why?”
“Because there is someone watching…protecting.”
SHE LAUGHS WITH EASE
He came forward
microphone in hand
a simple choice
to either run away
or smile and share the joy of life
alan skeoch
May 2018
“And you madam, what do you think of the Kensington Market today?”
“Just wonderful…”
(Marjorie Skeoch interviewed by CBC host for late night news)
JOY
Sally this is joy
to walk Augusta Avenue
with you
And see the fires of spring
in shortened skirts
and painted walls
alan skeoch
May 27, 2018
KENSNGTON
Let’s lighten up
And wash away the dust of winter
And see ourselves
in smiling eyes
and touch each other
without fear
of law suit or transgression.
alan skeoch
May 2018
WHERE IS TORONTO?
“Where is Toronto?, she asked
“Between heaven and hell,”
came the answer
with slight hesitation.
“Closer to which?”
“Heaven I would say,” she chiirped
without pause or deep breath
and that is the long and the short of it.
alan skeoch
May 28, 2018
MAX Layton reading from his latest poetry book…all poems contain the word “Like”
ON TURNING SEVENTY
Me decking through a barbed-wire fence into
The maze that marks the river’s edge
A chaos of vines and fallen trees walling off
The way ahead
Here, under the skirt of a towering evergreen
A winter’s worth of scat which my dogs sniff at
Coyotes, probably
The fur of rabbits poking out
I am unafraid
Though no house around, no sound except
The river moving under ice
On the river’s other side, a willow waiting
To be swept downstream
My dogs are waiting
They leap up eagerly when I turn and begin
The long trek back through the tangled wood
I am not lost
I have come to this place many times before
And I Know exactly where I am going.
(Max Layton, LIKE, GUERNICA PRESS, 2018)
GARNI TEMPLE
My hand could hurt
pressing it, ancient stone
exactingly hammered,
tested by sunstroke
wind and rain’s buffering
snow’s resentment
It carries me back to dawns
when sea wrinkled first shores
when moon kissed early mountains
and many tongues
sent prayer and pleading
to awesome gods
of waxing danger.
This sculpted sanctuary,
proudly empty, gigantic enough
to darken the sky
with massive discipline
of labouring men, burdened
by sheer weight
of haunting silence.
…Pilgrims move as on a drugged path,
fervent hearts pulsing
in wind-stilled hush
of pillars, pediments, and altars,
the gods withdrawn, mute as urns.
(KEITH GAREBIAN, POETRY IS BLOOD, GUERNICA 2017
Keith’s poetry in this volume laments the tragedies of his
Armenian people)
I CAN READ AND DRINK
I can read and drink
at the same time
and lose myself
in places
not visited before
alan skeoch
May 2018
Keith GAREBIAN reading from his latest poetry book titled “Poetry is Blood”
DAIR-EZ-ZOR
(Lost in the Syrian desert where the worst of the genocide happened)
Rasping in the burning air,
their throats open graves,
more days and nights
in sands of hallucination
Their broken bodies belong to silence,
their names kneel inside them,
begging mutely
in abandonment,
stop the slow extinguishing….
(Keith Garebian, POETRY IS BLOOD, 2017)
DESTROYING FAMILY PHOTOS
Unsanctioned my sister cast them away
family photos, memento mori,
I could not measure the ratio
between her relief and my loss.
…Photos said more
than the roar or whisper
of words.
they caught the truth
of bindings and releases.
(Keith Garebian, Poetry is Blood, Guernica, 2017)
BACK IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS
The trouble is we no longer know how
To make the simplest things
Things like a good eraser, the kind we
Had back in the good old days
Back in the good old days there was no
Mistake a good eraser couldn’t fix
No lie you could not retell
Ex-wives, lovers, broken promises?
A flick of the wrist brushed them away
Indiscretions, embarrassments, stupidities?
The bits blew clean off the page
But now, not matter how vigorously I rub
There’s always a dirty, grey, ever-widening
Smudge which nothing I do can change.
Of course, I blame the Chinese
The crappy erasers they sell so cheap
Theirs is an ancient, subtle civilization
Which understands what toruture a drop
Of water can be.
The slow drip-drip of history
Those who cannot erase, cannot rewrite
Those who cannot rewrite, cannot create
Those wo cannot create, will be erased.
(Max Layton, LIKE, Guernica 2018)
LIGHT AND DARK: POETRY CAN BE BOTH
AND NOW THE TEST: Marjorie snapped this sad photo as we slipped beneath the rail yards in the York Street Tunnel.
Note the homeless man sitting on his cardboard bed watching people like us in shiny cars zip through the tunnel leaving behind
an invisible curtain of carbon monoxide. THE TEST? WRITE A POEM Damnit…I feel like writing a poem myself.
I AM HERE
I am here
at present
invisible to most of you in your fancy cars
as you race to exit the York Street underpass
and then disperse in all directions
to happy homes
and friends and food and sleep.
Me?
I will roll over shortly
on my cardboard bed
and face the grey and blackened wall
painted with the black dots
of incomplete combustion.
It is a shroud
my shroud.
alan skeoch
May 28, 2018